Of Bygones! and Guilty Pleasures (and Weeds)

I’m going to go out on a limb and admit how much I love TV shows on DVD.  Oh, wait, it’s very crowded on this limb.  Most recently, I used a gift card from Christmas to buy the first season of Ally McBeal.  I was aware of the show when it originally aired and watched it very casually, but I was excited to see it again.  I had several reactions.  First, these people are supposed to be roughly my age.  Ally is 27 and almost everyone she works with was in her graduating class, so I guess they’re also supposed to be 27.  Except they look 35-40.  I need to watch a show that’s actually about mid-late twenty somethings.  Maybe a comedy-drama about grad students?  That sounds fascinating.  Second, Ally wears really short skirts and really long coats and weird shoes.

Third, Ally definitely channels Carrie in that she makes every conversation with friends about her and her problems only.  Also, she’s clearly kind of crazy, yet every guy loves her.  Fourth, she’s crazy in a way that doesn’t annoy me like adorably quirky female characters. She actually sees things, like dancing babies.  Let me actually go out on a limb this time and say that I think little animated characters dancing is the most hilarious thing ever.  I wish we saw more of this baby.  Fifth, I enjoy the show and if I adopt any Fishism, it’ll probably be “bygones!”  Since you probably have no idea what I’m talking about, because Ally McBeal isn’t exactly topical, you can basically say whatever you want, offend someone even, and then say “bygones!”–like, let’s forgive, forget, and move on already.

Over Christmas break, I resolved to read one book.  I made it Chuck Klosterman IV: Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas, a book of essays.  I heard of Klosterman from Bill Simmons, The Sport’s Guy, who I heard of from Adam Carolla’s podcast.  On his podcast, Simmons recently named Klosterman the czar of social commentary.  I enjoy hearing what he has to say, even though I don’t agree with a lot of his conclusions.  That’s about how I felt about the book.  I started reading it on the plane home to Washington.  By the time I got to the essay on U2, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to open the emergency exit and throw the book out of the plane or keep reading.   It sent me into a mini crisis about how hard it is to express yourself as an essayist and as one of the artists Chuck was profiling.  It’s like, no matter what you do or how authentic you are, someone can so easily come by and poke holes through everything you’ve done.  I was doing the same thing to Chuck that he was doing to Britney Spears and U2 and Val Kilmer. Something about that really bothered me.

There were a few more things that drove me absolutely insane, like a whole essay on how women hate women, all discussed as if it was a hilarious and original concept.  He also seems to conclude pretty often that nothing really matters that much, so what’s the point in being invested in anything.  That kind of relativism seems to completely undermine his own work.  The most redeeming essay was one near the end about guilty pleasures.  Chuck (I really enjoy calling him Chuck) destroys the very concept of guilty pleasures and says if you like something, then you can just like it and you don’t have to be ashamed of that.  On top of which, most of the things people name as guilty pleasures don’t even make sense.  One example he uses is the album Thriller.  Why would anyone be ashamed to like one of the best selling albums of all time by one of the biggest icons of all time featuring a song with one of the best videos of all time and another song with one of the best base lines of all time?  What’s to be ashamed of?

Over the weekend, I was finally able to watch the fifth season of Weeds.  I was apprehensive, because I didn’t really enjoy the fourth season; it seemed that whatever had been so captivating about the first three seasons had completely disappeared.  It turns out I was right to be apprehensive.  The magic did not return for season five.  There were some good moments, for sure, but not enough to make me watch intently.  At a certain point, I only kept watching because I wanted to be done.  I did, however, cement my opinion that Nancy Botwin is one of the weirdest characters I have ever encountered. She has really never made any sense, but in the beginning, you assign all these feelings to her, because she’s just lost her husband and she’s trying to support her kids.  At first you believe her when she says she’s just doing the best she can.  That eventually becomes very hard to believe.  It turns out she’s just incredibly selfish.  But that’s not really what’s weird about her.  What’s weird is the amount of time she spends chewing on straws and staring into space with her giant eyes.  And the ways she usually doesn’t react to things at all, but sometimes reacts in a really over the top way.  What’s weird is that you can never figure out her motivations.  What’s annoying is that she never seems to realize she’s responsible for the way everything always seems to be going wrong. Finally in season five she starts to get called on it.  My breakdown makes the show seems 100% serious, which it’s not.  It’s funny too, but not as funny as it used to be.